About me

Hi! I’m Riccardo, and I go by Palladius or just Ricc.

Work

Riccardo innaturally handsome at his wedding

I’m Developer Advocate for Google Cloud. This blog has a bit of personal and work-related stuff: from sports to travel, family and technology.

Been in Google for 11 years, and I’ve never found a way to write up all this amazing journey. It has to have fruitful content, italian drama and cool pics. The latter is taking me time to write. Some of my

I speak about SRE, Operations, Culture at Google, GenAI, and Ruby.

Personal

I’m Italian, except I’m mostly on time. I’ve lived in Italy 32 years, then moved to Ireland, and in 2011 I moved to Switzerland where I currently live with my kind and caring wife Kate and two amazeballs kids: AJ and Sebowski. You can find us on Instagram, or in the family gallery.

Of course, I live in Switzerland.

wineyard in Zurich
Vineyard in Meilen (Zurisee): I love cycling, swimming, wine and Zurich. Except you can't see the bike I'm holding while taking this pic.

Hobbies

To quote Graham, I used to have hobbies, now I have kids. My hobbies used to be around sport, music, travel, nerdiness and include:

  • Piano playing (mostly playing Genesis of Peter Gabriel era, or Dream Theater)
  • Doing triathlons (I completed two full Ironman, both in Zurich, and 5-6 half-distance around EMEA).
  • Playing Magic the Gathering (on Arena or with my kids, with disastrous effects - but at least Ale is learning to count to 20!)
  • Cooking with my Thermomix (they say it’s cheating). And blogging about American cooking Italian stuff.
  • Travel. I hold a spreadsheet of countries visited for me and my buddy Andrea. Currently around 61. Andrea hates me since I went on a cruise around caribbeans and got +5 in a week.
  • Computers. I love Ruby on Rails, Linux, bash scripting and mixing family with my coding. Dont believe me?
    • See aj-alphabet-dev.palladi.us on how to teach alphabet letters to your kids with known images.
    • See 🚧 PuffinTours 🚧 where I store our trips (WIP) and ability for my wife to vote for me. (She calls me puffin).

This site

This site is built in Hugo (of course I’d prefer Jekyll, but I followed the lead from my colleagues) with ZZO (docs). If you wonder why I chose this, it was a couple of weekends trying out 5 differnt things. The lessons learnt are here:

Lessons learnt:

  • https://github.com/palladius/ricc.rocks. Readme contains links to all alternative sites, like Ananke,
    Boostrap, Stack, Papermod, and Coder. Stack was my wife’s favorite, Bootstrap was my favorite, until I found out it had a smissing thing which I can’t remember. So I went for ZZO, which reminds me of the Italian zzo vuoi?, which is fun.

Alternative sites: